MONITORING OF RANDOMLY VARYING CHEMICAL PROCESSES BY CORRELATION CHROMATOGRAPHY

Correlation chromatography (CC) is a well known method for reducing de tection limits in chromatographic analysis. Its usefulness for the mon itoring of varying substance flows is however more ambiguous. Although generally believed as a useful tool for this purpose, very little wor k has been done to prove it. In this paper CC and common, single injec tion chromatography (SIC) were compared with respect to their restorat ion capabilities of a stochastic first order process, which is assumed to be the varying concentration input function of a chromatograph. It is demonstrated that CC can restore the input function with a smaller error than SIC when the process rate and input sequence length are re lated by a certain condition. The effect was found to be more profound when measurement noise is present due to the multiplex advantage of t he CC method. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.